As with all energy simulation programs, building physics and or a mechanical engineering background is helpful.
Mechanical, architectural, and energy engineers; energy-efficiency program administrators; energy-efficiency policy analysts; researchers; students and educators; software application developers.
From a technical standpoint, OpenStudio has several main strengths:
- It is structured as a non-graphical software development kit (SDK) and a separate graphical application that access the SDK via an application programming interface (API). The SDK can be reused by other graphical applications, with the OpenStudio graphical application serving as a template for doing so.
- The OpenStudio API can be scripted using languages like Ruby, Python, C#, and JavaScript and OpenStudio can interpret these scripts at runtime. The result is a dynamic extension, customization, and automation facility similar to Microsoft Excel's Visual Basic macros. A large library of OpenStudio scripts—commonly called OpenStudio measures—has been developed. Many of these apply model transformations in ways that correspond to energy conservation measures—hence the name measures—but others do custom reporting or visualization or import from and export to other analysis tools.
- OpenStudio measures as well as all OpenStudio component content (e.g., construction assembly specifications, equipment specifications, weather files, standard schedule specifications, etc.) exists outside of OpenStudio in the public Building Component Library (BCL) database. This content is crowd-sourced and vetted and the most recent versions are always available to OpenStudio or any client application. The content is also available to other applications.
Other strengths of the platform include an open-source license and committed support from DOE, utilities, and other organizations.